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Re:The Notre Dame fire and the future of history by rayiner on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @10:58AM (#19674173)
We spent a trillion dollars sending a man to the moon. We can do megaprojects if the exigency exists. But the bar for exigency is much higher now and that's a good thing. Notre Dame, by contrast, never did a damn thing for the French peasants that were taxed to pay for it.
Re:The Notre Dame fire and the future of history by deathanatos on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @02:13PM (#19675913)
The type of megaprojects being discussed in this thread are those that span lifetimes. Getting a man to the moon — without dismissing its huge impact, it was definitely a great work of mankind — was still done within a single lifetime.

I posed Proxima Centauri simply b/c it wasn't religious, and perhaps palatable as something humanity should undertake, but not feasible within a lifetime, as a counter-example to show that not all lifetime-spanning projects are worthless.